Zero to Cloud

Monday Dec 10, 2012

In today's era, Cloud Computing is becoming integral to the vision and corporate strategy of leading organizations and is often seen as a key business driver to achieve growth and innovation. Headquartered in Chongqing, China, CISDI Engineering Co., Ltd. is a large state-owned engineering company, offering consulting, engineering design, EPC contracting, and equipment integration services to steel producers all over the world. With over 50 years of experience, CISDI offers quality services for every aspect of production for projects in the metal industry and the company has evolved into a leading international engineering service group with 18 subsidiaries providing complete lifecycle for E&C projects.

CISDI group plans to expand through three phases in the construction of its cloud computing platform: first, it will relocate its existing technologies to Oracle systems, along with establishing private cloud for CISDI; secondly, it will gradually provide mixed cloud services for its subsidiaries and partners; and finally it plans to launch an industrial cloud with a highly mature, secure and scalable environment providing cloud services for customers in the engineering construction and steel industries, among others. “CISDI Cloud” will become the growth engine for the organization to expand its global reach through online services and achieving the strategic objective of being the preferred choice of E&C companies worldwide.

The new cloud computing platform is designed to provide access to the shared computing resources pool in a self-service, dynamic, elastic and measurable way. It’s flexible and scalable grid structure can support elastic expansion and sustainable growth, and can bring significant benefits in speed, agility and efficiency. Further, the platform can greatly cut down deployment and maintenance costs.

CISDI delegation highlighted these points as the key reasons why the group decided to have a strategic collaboration with Oracle for building this world class industrial cloud -
- Oracle’s strategy: Open, Complete and Integrated
- Oracle as the only company who can provide engineered system, with complete product chain of hardware and software
- Exadata, Exalogic, EM 12c to provide solid foundation for "CISDI Cloud"

The cloud blueprint and advanced architecture for industrial cloud computing platform presented in the session shows how Oracle products and technologies together with industrial applications from CISDI can provide end-end portfolio of E&C industry services in cloud.

Wednesday Dec 05, 2012

Introduction and Architecture

As
more and more enterprises deploy some of their non-critical workload on
Amazon Web Services (AWS), it’s becoming critical to monitor those
public AWS resources along side with their on-premise resources.

Oracle recently
announced Oracle Enterprise Manager Plug-in for Amazon Web Services
(AWS) allows you to achieve that goal. The on-premise Oracle Enterprise
Manager (EM12c) acts as a single tool to get a comprehensive view of
your public AWS resources as well as your private cloud resources. By deploying the plug-in within your
Cloud Control environment, you gain the following management features:

Users of this Plug-in can leverage the rich Enterprise Manager features
such as system promotion, incident generation based on thresholds,
integration with 3rd party ticketing applications etc. AWS
Monitoring via this Plug-in is enabled via Amazon CloudWatch API and
the users of this Plug-in are responsible for supplying credentials for
accessing AWS and the CloudWatch API.

This Plug-in can only be deployed on an EM12C
R2 platform and agent version should be at minimum 12c R2.Here is a pictorial view of
the overall architecture:

Rich and exhaustive list of metrics. Metrics can be
gathered from an Agent running outside AWS.

Critical configuration information.

Custom Home Pages with charts and AWS configuration
information.

Generate incidents based on
thresholds set on monitoring data.

Discovery and
Monitoring

AWS instances can be added to EM12C either via the EM12c
User Interface (UI) or the EM12c Command Line Interface ( EMCLI) by providing the AWS credentials (Secret Key
and Access Key Id) as well as resource specific properties as target
properties. Here is a quick mapping of target types and properties for each AWS
resources

Emcli utility is found under the ORACLE_HOME of EM12C
install. Once the instance is discovered, the target will show up under the
‘All Targets’ list under “Amazon EC2 Service’.

Once the instances are added, one can navigate to the custom
homepages for these resource types. The custom home pages not only include
critical metrics, but also vital configuration parameters and incidents raised
for these instances. By mapping the
configuration parameters as instance properties, we can slice-and-dice and
group various AWS instance by leveraging the EM12C Config search feature. The
following configuration properties and metrics are collected for these Resource
types.

Custom Home Pages

As mentioned above, we have custom home pages for these
target types that include basic configuration information, last 24 hours availability, top metrics and
the incidents generated. Here are few snapshots.